I saw an article that the movie “I.S.S.” made 1.2 million this opening weekend. I’m no movie expert but I’m guessing it cost a lot more than that to make.
Not trying to make an argument about whether they’re good or not, but it seems that the last 4 or 5 WB/DC Super Hero movies bombed hard, too. How does WB continue to make movies if each one makes less than it cost??
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I do statistics professionally (PhD and all!) a “bomb” is not classified as a film that loses money, but one that doesn’t make 2x budget in the opening. It gets a little weirder with streaming, but there are a lot of “bombs” that eventually break even. That’s piece 1. Piece 2 is that the film market is like the stock market. You want a diversified portfolio, some films will do worse than projected, some better, and on average the money earned is more than money spent so studios make money and stay in business.
Well, until they don’t. So, if a studio sucks and picks a lot of films that make less than what they cost they have 3 choices: 1) eat the cost, write the loss off on taxes and don’t release the movie at all, then disband the company. 2) realize you can’t make it work but maybe someone else can and sell the film to a bigger producer/cable/Netflix. 3) have an otherwise robust portfolio where other films make money so you eat this one, write off some loss, throw it low on streaming and hope someone loves it later because of a cool song or dumb podcast.
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